The disclosed technology relates generally to cellular networks, and more particularly to transmitting and receiving uplink state flag (USF) information using the cellular network.
Cellular telephones have become an increasingly popular communications tool. To support cellular communication, cellular networks provide a plurality of base stations that can each transmit and receive information to and from multiple cellular telephones over wireless channels. However, available physical communication resources may be limited, and therefore the multiple cellular telephones may need to communicate with the base station using the same frequency channel. Various cellular protocols have been developed to allow multiple cellular telephones to share a physical resource. In some protocols, an uplink state flag (USF) that is transmitted by a base station is employed to schedule uplink traffic from a particular mobile station to the base station. Conventionally, USFs are strongly encoded and employ encoding schemes that are based on Hamming distance to ensure reliability.